Brian Smith declined to blame defeat on three crucial decisions that went against London Irish as their three-game winning run in the Aviva Premiership came to an end at Madejski Stadium on Sunday.

There was a suggestion that Exiles' skipper George Skivington held up Logovi'i Mulipola, the scorer of Leicester's second try.

James O'Connor certainly felt one of his three missed penalties should have counted, while Jebb Sinclair was left wondering whether a match-winning try was wrongly ruled out because of a Leicester boot, rather than a knock-on by team-mate Ofisa Treviranus.

But Exiles' director of rugby refused to make excuses.

He said: "There's an argument that if we'd kicked our goals or scored that try at the death then we'd have won the game.

"But to be honest we weren't at our best.

"Leicester got amongst our lineout and we missed kickable chances.

"We were sloppy coming out of our half and that's what caused the problems with them scoring."

Irish produced the battling qualities that saw them win at Saracens and Wasps in the last fortnight, but failed to come up with any tries.

Exiles were resticted to four O'Connor penalties and one from Ian Humphreys, while Leicester crossed their line three times.

Then Vereniki Goneva slipped out of an O'Connor tackle, handed off Ian Humphreys and sprinted past Treviranus to punish an Irish side who had been reduced to 14 men just before the break by Eamonn Sheridan's yellow card for tackling Mathew Tait in the air.

Owen Williams added the conversion and then a penalty to extend Leicester's lead to 20-9.

And although O'Connor reduced the deficit with his fourth penalty, he missed three in total during the match.

O'Connor, though, felt that one of those missed penalties had gone over, but the ball was so high above the posts that the touch judges had failed to realise it should have counted.

Irish, who had started well before losing their way, rallied to produce a defiant final 10 minutes.

And when Leicester lost Thomas Waldrom to a yellow card there looked to be a chance of an Exiles fightback.

Humphreys took over kicking duties and slotted over a penalty to make it 20-15.

Roared on by a crowd of just over 9,000, Irish threw everything at their opponents.

Marland Yarde (twice), Topsy Ojo, O'Connor and Sheridan were all involved in a scintillating spell of play that ended with Jebb Sinclair going over the line.

But referee JP Doyle ruled that Ofisa Treviranus had knocked on in the build-up and Irish had to make do with a losing bonus point.

Smith said: "All of our home supporters have heard about the courage of our team over the last two games and they came to see a bit more of that.

"I'm not taking anything away from the fighting qualities of the team because we fought to the death and gave ourselves a chance which is admirable.

"But we wanted a bit more than that. We wanted to be more accurate.

"It wasn't our best show so we are disappointed.

Smith felt that Skivington had done enough for the Television Match Official to recommend ruling out Mulipola's try.

He said: "I thought we were under the ball.

"The referee asked the question 'Is there any reason I can't award a try?', rather than 'yes or no'. That might be significant in the wash-up.

"But the officials were there and doing their best.

"I don't have any problem with the way the game was handled.

"On the screen I thought (Skivington) was under the ball. But there is a man paid to do that (TMO) job and he does not need my advice.

"If we had played fantastic I would be arguing the toss on all these things, and also that there was a Tigers foot involved when the ball moved forward from Ofisa, but I'm not going to do that because we were not at our best.

"It would be wrong for us to be crying hard done by, because we are a better team than the way we performed.

"We are disappointed with the level of our performance. We weren't accurate enough."